WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Saturday defended his regime-change army assault on Venezuela as a “legislation enforcement” operation to arrest a drug kingpin, simply 5 weeks after having pardoned and launched from jail a convicted drug kingpin and regardless of his a number of statements that the incursion was to realize entry to grease.
“Our army, working with us, legislation enforcement, efficiently captured Maduro,” Trump mentioned, referring to Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, at a information convention from his Florida nation membership, the place he has spent the Christmas and New 12 months’s holidays.
Trump went on to say that the U.S. army would run Venezuela for the foreseeable future. “We’re not afraid of shoes on the bottom,” he mentioned.
“We don’t wish to be concerned with having any person else get in, and we’ve the identical state of affairs that we had for the final lengthy interval of years,” he added. “We’re going to run the nation till such time as we will do a protected, correct and even handed transition, and it needs to be even handed.”
He additionally claimed that Venezuela had “stolen” oil from the US.
“We constructed Venezuela’s oil business with American expertise, drive, and talent, and the socialist regime stole it from us throughout these earlier administrations,” he mentioned. “This constituted one of many largest thefts of American property within the historical past of our nation. Thought-about the biggest theft of property within the historical past of our nation. Huge oil infrastructure was taken like we had been infants.”
Jesus Vargas through Getty Photos
However Trump’s claimed curiosity in Maduro’s alleged drug trafficking stands in marked distinction to his Dec. 1, 2025, pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez. The previous president of Honduras had been serving a 45-year sentence in federal jail after a jury discovered he had been chargeable for smuggling greater than 400 tons of cocaine into the US.
Trump claimed — with out proof — that Hernandez had been wrongfully prosecuted by his predecessor, Joe Biden, though the prison probe of his actions had spanned three presidential administrations, together with his personal first time period from 2017 to 2021.
In the meantime, Trump has been open about his want for U.S. exploitation of Venezuelan oil reserves.
Operating to regain his workplace in 2024, Trump mentioned he had been near gaining that management in his first time period.
“Once I left, Venezuela was able to collapse. We’d have taken it over. We’d have gotten all that oil. It might have been proper subsequent door,” he mentioned at a North Carolina rally.
Simply two weeks in the past, Trump talked about oil as a justification for his army buildup off Venezuela’s coast.
“They took our oil rights, eliminated our firms, and we wish them again,” he advised reporters on the Joint Base Andrews tarmac beside Air Pressure One.
Trump has, for years, expressed his perception that the US had the fitting to confiscate oil utilizing the army. Whilst he falsely claimed to have opposed President George W. Bush’s Iraq struggle from the outset, he mentioned he would have seized Iraqi oil. “Take the oil!” he incessantly mentioned at his rallies in 2016.
Trump, in his remarks Saturday, repeated plenty of his frequent lies about Venezuela and drug smuggling. He claimed that every of the alleged drug smuggling boats he has ordered destroyed in current months represented 25,000 American lives saved.
In truth, that would solely be true if the boats had been carrying the lethal artificial opioid fentanyl, and the Trump administration has not provided any proof of this. Most fentanyl getting into the U.S. is available in throughout the Mexican border, carried by U.S. residents.
The 100 folks killed on the boats to this point had been probably smuggling cocaine and even marijuana.
Trump additionally claimed, once more, that Venezuela had dumped 1000’s of its criminals and mentally in poor health folks into the US. There isn’t any proof of this, and the false declare may mirror Trump’s confusion between people searching for political asylum and other people in psychological well being amenities.
